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In response to NBC4's exclusive report on LA Fire Department's new deployment plan, Fire Chief Brian Cummings talks with Robert Kovacik about the cutbacks...doing more with less and is this plan impacting public safety? Read Kovacik's story here: http://4.nbcla.com/zVdxBb (Published Saturday, March 3, 2012)

Updated at 12:31 PM PDT on Saturday, Mar 10, 2012

LA fire department officials admitted that for years the agency has used data that made it appear that firefighters were arriving at the scene of emergencies faster than they actually were, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Federal guidelines call for first responders to arrive in less than five minutes 90 percent of the time.

Budget Cuts Affecting Emergency Response Times, Union Says

Pat McOsker, the president of the United Firefighter of Los Angeles, the union that represents rank-and-file firefighters, joins NBC4's Chuck Henry to talk about budget cuts affecting fire stations and the communities. (Published Saturday, March 10, 2012)

But The Times reported a former department statistician counted all responses within six minutes, and that inflated the percentage of firefighters arriving within five minutes of a dispatch.

Retired Capt. Billy Wells said he followed the department's tradition of using a six-minute response standard, and his successor, Capt. Mark Woolf, said he continued using the for a while, because he didn't want to be blamed for a sudden drop in department performance.

“I didn't want to touch that (extra) minute because I knew the data would take a dump,” Woolf told The Times.

Corrected data shows that in 2008, the department actually hit the five- minute goal 64 percent of the time, officials said.

By last year, that number had fallen to about 60 percent.

Fire Department spending has been reduced more than 15 percent in recent years, and about a quarter of the city's 106 fire stations have eliminated staffing for fire trucks or ambulances, according to The Times.

The issue came about recently because Los Angeles mayoral candidate Austin Beutner blamed slower response times on staffing cuts due to city budget woes.

Beutner was first deputy mayor under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa prior to the fire department staffing plan being put into effect, according to a Beutner staff member.